• Akismet 2.2.3 -  Must have for spam prevention. Without it you really won’t be able to use your wordpress.
• Facebook Connect 1.0 – Effectively turns your blog into a extension of facebook, which maybe good or bad.
• ShareThis 2.3 – Needed to enable quick social bookmarking features.
• SyntaxHighlighter 1.1.2 – Essential for any code snippet posts.
• WordPress Database Backup 2.2.2 Backing up your thoughts.
• wp_time_since 1.0 – Convert time to meaningful post freshness info.
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin 2.1.6 - Great tool for increasing page view.

Thanks to all these people’s great work!

So I think I’ve done enough with the new design to roll it out today. Here is a screenshot of the old design. The old one was simpler but also had less features. Just as a reference.

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• redo look and feel of comment section
• expose/attribute plugins
• contextual post bar for single post, search, and 404
• widgetize sidebar
• use composite images as background
• add image preloader
• paging service for widgets
• timeline control for archives
• reduce width of sidebar
• move post meta to side
• display excerpt on multi-post pages
• move search, twitter, subscribe and share this to a single line bar
• highlight feature posts to include images on parchment
• update post title look and feel
• twitter animation
• refined themeimage
  
• facebook connect
• clean up post styles
• clean up post date style
• clean up post meta
• customized paging
• google ads
• recent comments
• cc license
• social feature
• fix next post bug
• add post and comment time since then used a plugin
• viewing stage popup indicator replaced with post title clip
• speaker style for quick press posts
• comment thread

“…Maybe the team lead is traveling in a space shuttle between galaxies…”

I have been having fun with jQuery for a while and found it a truly state-of-art Javascript library. It’s got many good non-intrusive designs and incredible behaviour predictability. I figured one day that I was reluctant to do DOM manipulation when I was asked to do some SIMPLE proof-of-concept javascript hacks. I certainly hate jQuery in a way that it makes me so lazy, you know, people sometimes feel more secure with better knowledge of the underlying mechanisms but I just can’t help forgetting them.

Anyway, while I am lovin’ jQuery, I always thought I had an reliable omnipotent library, the mighty Dojo Toolkit (“Hallelujah“!) , and that really made me feel secure as if I am backed with it so that if I ever found something can’t be tackled by “lightweight” libraries like jQuery, I can go and grab Dojo and attack the problems with Dijits and Dojox.

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“…I am always easily fed up by having too many options…”

This blog is more about reflection of realization of how I think I can keep up with the world’s latest technologies rather than Peppy itself.

When I first read about Peppy, yet another CSS selector, I was very reluctant to wholeheartedly accept it. I’ve just become a fan of jQuery and now there is something new. Nowadays everyone is trying to impress others and nobody can tell immediately whose work will last for a long time. However given a bunch serious unit tests by the author and a solid benchmark results, apparently some great work is done here. So I’d like to check out how to integrate this new CSS selector with some of other JS frameworks to use it in my next project.

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